Amid the propaganda in Barack Obama’s speech at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Soweto on December 10 2013, was an encoded signal. Obama’s so-called eulogy was really intended to reaffirm a well-advanced plan to construct a transnational empire. This article explores how an emergent transnational capitalist class ensured that the South African uprising would result in a false solution that appeared to end apartheid, and why this story has been covered-up by the Global Media Complex.

Spooky spin: Obama telling a freedom-themed fable in Soweto.

Befriending a legacy of ‘freedom’ in a bank-sponsored sports stadium

At amemorial service held for Nelson Mandela, United States President Barack Hussein Obama said, “We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again”.

These spooky words, spoken with an intonation that cringingly mimicked Bill Clinton’s signature oratory, were slipped in among hyper-rhetoric about the efficacy of direct action, well-reasoned arguments and the power of the human spirit.[1]

Mandela, who died on December 5 2013 aged 95, had been leader of the African National Congress (ANC) party, which led a resistance and armed struggle against the racist fascists that ruled South Africa’s apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994.[2] Also known by his Xhosa clan name, Madiba, Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, from 1963 to 1990, after the CIA assisted in his arrest by passing on his travel plans to the South African Security Service, as James Sanders revealed in his book Apartheid’s Friends: The Rise and Fall of South Africa’s Secret Service (SASS).[3]

In 1994, when Mandela became the first black president of the Republic of South Africa the world hoped that true freedom would come to a people who had been suppressed on the basis of racial prejudice. Tragically, this hope has yet to manifest into reality.

With feigned humility, Obama audaciously asserted, “I will always fall short of Madiba’s example. He makes me want to be a better man.”[4] This emotively loaded line provoked a standing ovation at the packed First National Bank sports stadium in Soweto, Johannesburg. Among those drawn to their feet were former United Nations’ Secretary–General Kofi Atta Annan, and two former Commander-in-Chiefs of the United States, George Walker Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, and former United States’ Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama’s categorical assertion that there is never to be someone like Mandela again is spooky, not simply because the Orwellian Obama regime carries out extra-legal executions by drone attacks,[5] and kidnaps ‘enemy combatants’ or ‘enemy belligerents’ for torturing.[6] Neither is it simply because of the US National Security Agencies’[7] mass surveillance technologies,[8] international spy network[9] and its largely hidden collaborations with transnational corporations[10] that investigators such as James Bamford have written about for years, before the brave Edward Snowden became a hunted whistleblower.[11]

What is deeply spooky about Obama saying that the world “will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again” is that the global news media did not even raise a single metaphorical eyebrow.

This failure occurred because to do otherwise would mean investigating why exactly the man who once wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope made this sweeping assertion, with all its inferred global geographical coverage and permanence.

Obama’s categorical statement is foreboding because it implies that the transnational capitalist class has learned much from suppressing uprisings, regardless of where they spring from, no matter the pigment of their freedom-fighting skins. And, because the Global Media Complex, which is a fraction of the transnational capitalist class,[12] has learned to deploy more sophisticated, Orwellian propaganda since Mandela was initially imprisoned.[13]

C is for Compromise

To understand why Mandela ‘chose’ reconciliation, it is crucial to know about the power structure that underpinned the white Afrikaner elite and the pressures brought to bear on them from the emerging transnational capitalist class.

A white supremacist brotherhood called the Afrikaner Broederbond (Afrikaner Brotherhood), which formed in 1918, controlled the apartheid regime.[14] This secret society was comprised of descendants from mostly Dutch-settlers who were bitter about losing the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).[15] Modeled on Freemasonry and the Sons of England clubs, the Afrikaner Brotherhood resolved to regain control of the Republic of South Africa from British rule through influence, indoctrination, infiltration, intimidation and intrigue.

To this end, the secret network of the Afrikaner Brotherhood came to occupy key positions of the state apparatus, including parliament, the police, military, judiciary and penal systems, universities, schools, and the state-controlled broadcasting monopoly. The Broeders also held top posts in private sector institutions such as law and accountancy firms, and cartelized industries including banking, mining, and communications.

Under their regime, they spied on native Africans and ‘sympathizers’. The Afrikaner Broederbond covered-up their systematic repression that included kidnapping, beatings, torture, and serial murdering such as ‘disappearing’ people by dropping them from aircraft over the ocean.[16] In addition to this full-spectrum state-sponsored terrorism, the regime isolated the indigenous population into shanty-towns, where most were unemployed or working essentially as low-paid wage slaves.

Amid pressure from a global anti-Apartheid campaign, some in the Afrikaner Broederbond began to realize that ‘the writing was on the wall’. As John Pilger reports in his article “Mandela’s Greatness May be Assured – But Not His Legacy”[17] and in his 1998 documentary Apartheid Did Not Die,[18] the Afrikaner elite pursued a strategy to divide the black resistance in the late 1980s, while Mandela was still behind bars. The Broederbond’s goal was to ensure that they did not go to jail for genocidal crimes, otherwise the Afrikaner Brotherhood would be unable to enjoy their wealth, power and egotistical lifestyles under the façade of a post-political apartheid South Africa.

According to Michael Schmidt in his article “The Dictatorial Roots of Neo-liberal Democracy in South Africa and Chile”, a meeting took place in September 1985 between the African National Congress (ANC) party leadership at its headquarters at Lusaka, and white businessmen and newspaper editors.[19] ANC president Oliver Tambo and the Anglo-American Corporation’s Gavin Reilly lead each side. There was symbolic value in having the head of the Anglo-American Corporation lead the white delegation, because it was primarily the British and American capital class that were moving in to take control of the Republic. To apply pressure to the Broeders, Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank recalled a $500 million loan to South Africa in 1985 and other banks followed suit.[20]

The chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond, Pieter de Lange, who had met with the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki in New York, urged his fellow Broeder, prime minister P. W. Botha, in mid-1986 to negotiate with the ANC.[21] The same year, the United States joined the economic warfare started by the Chase Manhattan Bank and imposed sanctions against the regime.[22]

In 1987, a meeting took place in Senegal between 17 ANC members and 61 Afrikaner intellectuals, including the leader of the Progressive Federal Party, Frederick van Zyl Slabbert.[23] A dozen other meetings took place between November 1987 and May 1990, at a mansion called Mells Park House, near Bath in western England, as Patti Waldmeir reported in her over-enthusiastically titled 1997 book, Anatomy of a Miracle. At Mells Park House the Afrikaner elite met with an inner circle of the exiled ANC leadership, led by Mbeki, where they discussed a probable transition to a non-apartheid democracy, constitutional protections for whites, and the kind of economic system South Africa might have.[24] (Mbeki would later succeed Mandela as president).

On 5 July 1989, Botha met with Mandela in prison. After Botha suffered a stroke in 1989, F. W. de Klerk speed up the process of secret negotiations with the exiled African National Congress party.[25] This ‘speed politics’ essentially isolated the 3 million members of the newly formed United Democratic Front, whose most famous spokesman was Bishop Desmond Tutu.[26]

As Michael Schmidt points out, against the backdrop of the civil war, there was a sequence to the transformation: “first the spies, then the businessmen, then the commissars, then the intellectuals, then the politicos.”[27]

Few today realize that when Mandela was released from prison, the American establishment was not thrilled. [28] It was not until Mandela gave-up and resigned himself to a decision that had already been arrived at by others while he was still in jail, that he was treated as a darling of American political and media elites (for whom, making-up freedom-themed fables is a sacred daily ritual). Thabo Mbeki was the one who talked Mandela around to sucking up the big ‘C-word’ of Compromise. If there were a book called the Alphabet of International Affairs with a special edition for the apparent end of apartheid in South Africa, the ‘C-word’ would mean going along with the transnational capitalists’ favoured path of reconciliation.

In 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) gained nominal political power only. Despite promises made by Mandela that the ANC would dismantle the apartheid economy through massive land redistribution, and nationalize “mines, banks and monopoly industries”,[29] the Afrikaner Broederbond were able to maintain their alliances with the power interests of international capital.[30] Cronyism became rampant between the newly wealthy black businessmen, the heads of the ANC, the old wealth among established Broeders and coalitions of transnational capitalists.[31]

Supposed ‘technical’ and ‘administrative’ functions of the economic apparatus were placed in the hands of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, and the soon-to-be-established World Trade Organization, that together serve the interests of international capital. Land reform became all but impossible without a constitutional change, since a clause had been written into the Republic’s new constitution preventing the redistribution of vast tracts of land held by the white minority population.[32]

Reconciliation meant the Afrikaner Broederbond never faced trial for the atrocities of their apartheid regime.[33] In their 1989 book entitled “A Crime Against Humanity: Analysing the Repression of the Apartheid State”, the Human Rights Committee reported that in just an eight-year period between 1981 and 1989, the genocide meted-out by the Afrikaners took the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people, through military violence and economic repression.[34]

Gallingly, when the authors of The Super-Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond, Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydomwere investigating the Afrikaner Brotherhood, insiders of this secret society whined that the Freemasons and the Sons of England had used their secret networks to gain and maintain power too.

It is a cliché that the Afrikaners failed to learn deep lessons of the bitter blow dealt to them in the Second Boer War by the coalition mustered by the British Empire. Due to a European Superiority Complex that they had in common with the British ruling class, the Afrikaners lacked compassion toward the native tribes with which they had refused to share land, wealth and power.

Despite the authors of the book The Super-Afrikaners publishing the names of 7,500 of the estimated 17,000 members in 1978, the Broeders were ultimately protected by other powers of the world that were complicit in these crimes against humanity. The world community’s complicity was due to their long-held silence, either because of their ties to the Broederbond’s apartheid regime, or due to submission to stronger capitalist states with such bonds.

In other words, a transnational capitalist class led by the British and Americans, managed the outcome of the South African native uprising, partly so that they would benefit from the outcome. This managed process to a ‘free-market’ neoliberal democracy also prevented the threat of a ‘bad example’, or true political and economic autonomy spreading to other jurisdictions. It also suppressed the danger of justice being served to the perpetrators and igniting the imaginations of oppressed peoples the world-over. Consequently, the propagandist value of western leaders rubbing shoulders with the Global Media Complex’s newly lionized ‘freedom fighter’, Nelson Mandela, was capitalized on to maximum effect!

Unfortunately, when the ANC settled on the reconciliation compromise, most of the global anti-apartheid movement bought into the fanfare. Little did the native bantu resistance movement of South Africa realize how close to real victory they were if they had not let their leaders give into logically fallacious arguments, the lure of centralized power, and fear.

Following Mandela’s death, the former National Chairman of the New Zealand anti-apartheid group, Halt All Racist Tours (HART), that protested against the ’whites only’ South African Springbok rugby team playing against the New Zealand All Blacks in 1981, weighed in with an opinion piece, “A great man, but not a great president”. In this opinion piece, John Minto argued that Mandela failed to hold fast to the principles laid out in the ANC’s 1956 ‘Freedom Charter’.[35] This charter, which stipulated land redistribution to landless people, living wages, free education, public ownership of the banks and other monopoly industries, and for commerce to serve the needs of the people, was written after 50,000 volunteers scoured the country for the views of oppressed bantu (or native) and Indian populations.[36] “In Mandela’s new South Africa”, wrote Minto, “oppression based on race morphed into discrimination based on social class and life went on as “normal”.”

Unfortunately, the ANC’s negotiator’s fell into a ‘horse-trading trap’ wherein they gave away concessions to control of key institutions, without apparently fully realizing the ramifications, as journalist Naomi Klein reported in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. These organizations included: the treasury and the central bank; the pro-globalization, pro-wealthy, job out-sourcing body, the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was the forerunner to the World Trade Organization (WTO); and even the new parliament (with the clause in the constitution that prevented land redistribution added at a late stage). Evidently, the ANC fell under the spell of Thabo Mbeki, who it appears had fallen for the intoxicating black magic of ‘free-market’ zealotry, which included new wealth and power for elites willing to exploit a naïve base of constituents, while living in England during the neoliberal era of Thatcherism.

As Minto pointed out, John Pilger seems to be the only journalist who took Mandela to task over the reign of the status quo that suited the propertied class. In Pilger’s 1998 documentary Apartheid Did Not Die, Mandela is visibly annoyed with Pilger, who was simply doing his job properly, by challenging South Africa’s president for not doing his job properly. In recalling this documentary, Minto states that Mandela failed as a president (and after) because he refused to confront the continued economic apartheid meted-out to the indigenous and Indian population groups of South Africa under ‘free market’ capitalism.

Spooky Spin: The politics of skin colour performed by a corporate wolf

By imposing neoliberal ‘free market’ economic shock treatments on countries all over the world – including South Africa – a transnational capitalist class has been able to deepen their political control, as Naomi Klein compellingly shows in her book, The Shock Doctrine [37] Their objective in South Africa, as in so many far-flung places, was to keep the mass native populace in a poverty-stricken state, so that they would continue to have only their ‘skins’ to trade for their survival, as Karl Marx could have predicted. Mandela, Mbeki and the rest of the ANC leadership complied, either out of egotistical ambitions for power, or a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome (wherein some appeared to develop an affection for their psychopathic ‘rulers’), or a failure to anticipate the balkanization of the economy by the de Klerk regime and the transnational capitalists.[38] Thus, the native population of South Africa is yet to achieve an end to economic apartheid and therefore a true end to political apartheid, since any group can only control their politics once they gain control over sufficient economic resources – especially land.[39]

Therefore, Obama’s speech was spooky because the US president was able to trade on the colour of his skin when he claimed he drew inspiration from Nelson Mandela as a young man, without the global media missionaries pointing out this audacious manipulation. At the same time, Obama omitted the fact that he is not simply the Commander-in-Chief of a nation, but also of a transnational financial-military empire.[40]

This transnational empire advances the agenda of war on behalf of its core clients, the wealthy owners of vast transnational corporations. The wars that the American government’s Department of ‘Defense’ wages on behalf of its transnational capitalist class clients, are about asserting and maintaining control over the world’s resources, its banking systems, territories and, ultimately, the mass populaces of whole societies.

This permanent war is even waged on a domestic front, as the suppression of the peaceful Occupy Movement by the American state-apparatus demonstrated.[41] So when Obama audaciously said, “There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people”,[42] the bulk of the applauding crowd unwittingly demonstrated that the global media propaganda system stills holds currency for the more elusive, brazen ‘Transnational Brotherhood’.[43]

Thus, even as Obama was pulling on the heart-strings of the naïve, he was also signaling to ears attuned to such propaganda that as a front-man for the Transnational Brotherhood, he will play his part to ensure that no one ever threatens their domination again. In other words, as Obama was shamelessly encouraging the ‘hope of freedom’, he also offered an encoded commitment to advance ‘the game’ to his fraternal friends in the transnational capitalist class, lest they doubt his solidarity with their global neocolonial project.[44]

It is therefore, crucial to de-indoctrinate those who still believe in the false ‘freedom’ marketed by well-groomed wolf-puppets in corporate clothing such as Obama. Their obliviousness to the hidden mechanisms and objectives underpinning this deceitful hope is keeping us all under the rule of a class of people who have more in common with the Afrikaner Broederbond than they are willing to admit. When, not if, such naïve people en masse correctly see the Transnational Brotherhood as cowards who use subterfuge to hide their crimes against humanity, a long-overdue day of reckoning – the likes of which the world has never seen – will become inevitable.

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By day, Snoopman works undercover as an ordinary mortal, editing news at a television station. By night, Snoopman researches the wicked deeds of the powerful, and is Editor-in-Chief at Snoopman News. (See Snoopman News for sourced references)